In the field of clinical test, a specimen such as blood or urine taken from a patient at a hospital is enclosed in a test tube, is delivered to a laboratory in the hospital or a test center, and is analyzed by an analyzing apparatus. When the specimen is loaded into the analyzing apparatus, various kinds of pre-processing such as centrifugation for the test tube in which the specimen is enclosed (hereinafter, referred to as a parent specimen test tube), plug opening of parent specimen test tube, preparation of a plurality of test tubes (hereinafter, referred to as child specimen test tubes) used at the time of dispensing a specimen from the parent specimen test tube, and dispensing of a child specimen are performed, and then the specimen is delivered to the analyzing apparatus for analysis processing. When a request for a retest based on the test result is not made, the specimen for which the analysis is completed is conveyed to a storage module and accommodated and stored therein.
In recent years, a series of these operations regarding pre-processing, conveyance to the analyzing apparatus, analysis, and specimen storage after analysis have been automated and used as a specimen pre-processing system or specimen conveyor system in a laboratory in the hospital or a test center.
Patent Document 1 discloses a system in which a specimen is loaded and analyzed and then the analyzed specimen is stored, and the system includes a rack collecting apparatus which accommodates racks holding the analyzed specimens in trays and arranges the trays vertically in five stages and laterally in two columns for storage.
Also, when storing the specimens, test tubes containing specimens are mounted on a specimen tray (hereinafter, referred to as a tray) capable of carrying a plurality of test tubes and the tray is stored in a place for cold storage such as a refrigerator. Most operators manage the specimens in units of trays.
Also in a storage apparatus of a specimen test system, a tray used for the specimen storage can be accommodated by directly setting it. This eliminates an interchanging operation of taking out test tubes from a tray and putting them into another storage container at the time of storage and can save trouble. However, the tray is required to have a shape that can be set into the apparatus, and a dedicated tray is used. Since the tray is a dedicated one, the number of test tubes that can be mounted on one tray is fixed, and it is therefore not possible to handle the storage in small quantity and the storage of the test tubes more than the upper-limit number of specimens that can be mounted on the tray.
Also, in a specimen test automation system, a specimen is conveyed via a conveyor line. For example, Patent Document 3 discloses a specimen test automation system in which a specimen conveyed via a conveyor line to a storage apparatus is transferred from the line by a robot arm onto a tray set at a transfer position.
Furthermore, for example, Patent Document 1 discloses a system in which a storage unit for storing a tray is configured in multiple stages and a tray is taken out from any shelf to transfer a specimen at a transfer position.